GNU Fortran (g77)
is the Fortran development system for
Project GNU.
GNU means "GNU's Not UNIX(tm)"
and is the primary project currently being worked
on by the Free Software Foundation (FSF),
a non-profit organization committed to the creation of a
large body of useful, free, source-code-available software.
GNU is intended as a replacement, wholesale and/or
in pieces, for a complete UNIX system.

GNU Fortran is still considered to be in (public) beta testing,
and has been since February 17, 1995.
The Free Software Foundation and the g77 developers
would like to continue improving g77 until it is perfect.
If g77 doesn't meet your needs at the moment,
please let them know why.

As the motto implies, g77
pertains to the "number-crunching community".
This community includes people and organizations
that design things like buildings, bridges, and ships;
that forecast the weather;
that monitor seismic data to predict earthquakes,
volcanic eruptions, or locate oil deposits;
and so on.

As with all
free software,
GNU Fortran, or g77,
will continue to progress and evolve as directed
by those who take the time and make the effort to
test, fix, and improve it.

That means you!!

While the "loss" of the original author of a product
like g77
can take some steam out of the energy driving its development,
it can also set the stage for fresh inspiration
as well as for discovering new sources of perspiration.

If you're willing to help out, please email
gcc at-sign gcc.gnu.org
with your ideas or suggestions.
Note that this email address is a
mailing list
with a huge number of subscribers
(it has some "spam protection" as well, however),
so take that into account when writing your message.

GNU Fortran (g77)
is developed, tested, and also used
by a large number of people around the world.
Emails have been received by the developers from
users in China and Cuba, as well as from most countries
well-represented on the Internet.

Since I'll no longer be working as a volunteer
on g77 beyond
GCC 2.95,
it is no longer appropriate to donate funds to me
with the idea that they'll fund future development.
I don't mind receiving funds for appreciation of my
past efforts, or for other reasons, of course!

While developing code with g77,
you might want to also have available
a free program called f2c,
a Fortran-to-C converter whose output,
compiled by a quality C compiler (such as GNU C) and linked with the
libf2c (or compatible) library
(called F77 and L77, though they can be
stuck together, and often are, in a library called libf2c),
produces an executable for the input Fortran program.
It works quite well,
supports ANSI FORTRAN 77 plus some popular extensions,
and bug fixes have been made to it fairly rapidly in response to bug reports.
I use a
shell script
to obtain and unpack the latest version of f2c.
I sometimes have to modify it when changes are made
by the distributors, so it isn't necessarily up-to-date at any
given time.
(Now that I've added it to the CVS repository
for GCC,
anyone can submit patches to improve it.)

To obtain important announcements about g77,
send email asking to be added to the
info-gnu-fortran at-sign gnu.org
mailing list.

For information on other pertinent mailing lists,
see the g77 documentation,
and the Project GNU web site.

Work on g77 currently is mostly within the domain
of the GCC project,
which is producing versions of GCC starting with 2.95.
See http://gcc.gnu.org/
for more information,
including mailing list, mailing-list archives, on-line documentation,
and so on.